The arrival of Christianity in the West brought profound and complex—and sometimes violent—shifts in values, as well as in beliefs. The body intensified from being a laborious distraction, as Plato viewed it, to become a seething locus of sin and temptation—not merely “bad” but “evil,” as Nietzsche would later put it. And yet Christians also maintained that every single human had been made “in the image and likeness of God;” humanity was now unified, instead of being split into Greeks (or Romans) and potential slaves.
But a question: if humans are images of the divine, how can the body be evil? Answer: if the imagery is not corporeal, but lodges in some component of the human being that is psychic or mental, and so opposed to the body. The human image of God is thus necessarily invisible. What can it be? i what invisible component of the human being does its likeness to God reside?
The problem came home for Augustine, a Christian from Hippo in Africa, when he tried to explain his belated conversion to Christianity. Motivation for this could not come from his bodily desires, which he well knew would have to be abjured should he become a Christian (da me castitatem et continentiam, he pleaded, sed noli modo: grant me chastity and continence, but not just now, Confessions VIII.7). Nor could it be a deliverance of reason, for reason clears up mysteries, while Christianity is founded on a mystery—that of the Incarnation (quid autem sacramenti haberet…ne suspicari quidem poteram, Confessions VII.19). But according to the ancients (after Aristotle anyway), reason and desire are the only two factors in human nature which can cause human actions. (Plato had complicated things slightly with τιμή, ambition—but is not the desire for honor merely, in the end, another desire?)
The sheer fact of Augustine’s conversion could only mean that Aristotle was wrong: there was something else in Augustine, a principle of action independent of both reason and desire—and therefore, it seemed, independent of natural causality altogether. Being independent of nature, it must be a direct gift from God; and, if free will is a direct gift of God, it must be that in virtue of which a human being is the image of God. We are thus made in the image of God, not visibly, but through something interior to us: what would come to be called “free will.” So free will received the job of establishing human likeness to the divine, and in such moderns as Descartes and Kant would assume the role of ousiodic form in the human self: the order of the mind;s various faculties would be maintained by an act of will.
But did Augustine discover free will, or invent it?
God, it seems, causes me to have free will in the first place, but if the choices I subsequently make really are free, even God does not cause them. An act of the free will thus has no cause beyond itself—it is in this respect causa sui, cause of itself, which is only fitting for what makes me, an image of God.
An act of free will is thus an uncaused commitment to a course of action, and this has implications for what choice itself is. When there is only one pathway forward, our choice of it cannot be free; so what we do freely must be something selected from a wider set of alternatives, other possible courses of conduct. This kind of choice, the uncaused selection of one alternative from a broader array, then becomes “choice” itself.
We do, i think, make choices in roughly this way. When I am in a cheese shop, I may see three or four cheeses which look equally appetizing and cost about the same. My choice among them is unmotivated, random. It does, to be sure, have causes—the color of one of the cheeses may remind me of a favorite sweater, for example—but these factors do not explain the choice: they do not help my justify my decision. The resemblance of a cheese to my sweater does not reduce the mystery of my choice of it.
What Augustine has done, I suggest, is apply this model of uncaused but trivial choices to a momentous one—the choice of a religion. Other models are possible: for Aristotle, such a choice would be made by taking one’s concept of happiness (eudaimonia), reasoning back to one’s present situation, and doing what, in that situation, would lead most directly to happiness (#10). No need, here, to choose among alternatives; only one course of action need be on the menu, because at, least sometimes, only one most fully manifests the moral identity (reason plus desire) of the (Aristotelian) chooser.
To be sure, such moral choices may on occasion require selecting among alternatives—there may be several courses of action which lead equally directly to happiness. But that is not a requirement for the choice to be moral, or the action to be free, for a “free” action is not one which results from a free choice, but one which manifests the moral identity of the chooser.
What Augustine has done, then, is what Homer did with his metaphors: he has fixed upon an existing similarity and elevated it into a social truth.